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…we can now compare Trump’s first year in office to his predecessors’. And in that comparison, Trump comes out looking pretty good.

Trump’s first-year jobs numbers were very, very good
By Philip Bump
The Washington Post
January 5, 2018

On Friday morning, the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released employment numbers for December, bookending President Trump’s first year in office.

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With those numbers in hand, we can now compare Trump’s first year in office to his predecessors’. And in that comparison, Trump comes out looking pretty good.

Relative to the figure from January in each president’s first year in office (excluding those presidents who took office after a death or resignation), Trump saw one of the biggest percentage-point drops in the unemployment rate.

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Under Trump, there were 1.8 million more people working in December than in January. Under Obama, 4.3 million fewer.

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Between January and December of last year, the country added 184,000 manufacturing jobs, the third-most of the presidents for whom data is available after Carter and John Kennedy.

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Trump’s consistently celebrated the economic numbers the country has seen during his time in office and the numbers from the BLS certainly give him some reason to do so.